What a station website should actually do

Most station websites are three things stacked on top of each other: a logo, a stream button, and a page of links that stopped working some years ago. The schedule is a photograph of a schedule. The DJ page has four people, two of whom left.

This one is built differently, and the difference is worth explaining.

The schedule knows what time it is

The grid below the player is not a picture. It knows the station’s own time zone, works out what is on the air right now, and says so — correctly for a listener in the market and for one three time zones away, which is most of the internet.

Move a show and it moves everywhere at once: the “on air now” line, the show’s own page, the schedule grid, and the air times printed under each host. They are all reading the same grid, so they cannot disagree with each other.

Everything a station changes is editable

Shows, hosts, the schedule, events, the words on the About page. All of it is edited in a browser and saved without anyone opening a repository.

Swapping a DJ is ninety seconds on a phone. That is the number that matters, because it is the difference between a website that keeps up with the station and one that slowly stops being true.

Nothing here is a plugin

The whole site is plain files on a fast network. No database to breach, no admin login to brute-force, no version of anything to patch on a Tuesday because somebody found a hole in it.

That is not a technical preference. It is the reason a station can leave this running for three years and think about it only when the lineup changes.